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At what point do bookmarks essentially become an internet of your own making? I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collect

At what point do bookmarks essentially become an internet of your own making? I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection, or maybe a Yahoo style directory to browse them. Or... Stop collecting the internet and give your brain a break from data overload. There is a certain flavour of FOMO that keeps tabs open forever and bookmark lists getting huge. Let go of it all. There will always be more data to consume every day, you'll never have time for that AND 5k of bookmarks. Use Google when you want to go back to something. I bet if you deleted 90% of those bookmarks you would not really miss them after a month.

munmaek 7y ago
Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name... How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is virtually unlimited, and we can only collect so many bookmarks anyway. Searching through bookmarks isn’t a difficult task, and it’s way better than relying on google.
- nounaut 7y ago
  Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.
  - monadgonad 7y ago
    I think you're missing the wood for the trees a bit there. The point is that there's so much on Google now - and a lot of it is effectively just crap data like pinterest posts - that it becomes increasingly impossible to find specific needles in that haystack. If I know at some point in the last 10 years I've read an article online that could have been written any point in the last 30 years, before and after dates don't really help.
    - beenBoutIT 7y ago
      Pintrest seems to inappropriately float to the top of way to many searches.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    You're suggesting spending a lot of time and hassle trying to wrestle with search engines instead of just keeping a bookmark that can be found and accessed very quickly?
- dempedempe 7y ago
  2600 has an essay, "The Mysteries of the Hidden Internet", on this phenomenon in their autumn 2019 quarterly. It was quite a fun read! Check it out at Barnes and Noble. Or buy a copy (https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019 https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019).
- monkeynotes 7y ago
  > The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this” I think for me there is so much information coming at me every day, that I rarely have time to go back to something later. I bookmark a select number of sites for projects/interests I am working on but I couldn't deal with having ~5k worth of bookmarks in my backlog. I just don't have time for managing/triaging/reviewing that. My comment about FOMO addresses the fear of 'what if I can't find this stuff again'. It's more akin to a hoarding mentality, I suppose. How many people's garages are full of junk they 'think they might come back to later'. It's something I actively eschew because if I allow that thought process to enter into my life I'll be hindered by the activity, and the ability to let go is important to my happiness and wellbeing. I literally can't sleep at night if I think that I might missed out on archiving something I might need. I find it enlightening to treat the world as ephemeral. I freely admit different people work/think/live in different ways and perhaps my original comment was a little flippant.
StavrosK 7y ago
> I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection I did: https://historio.us https://historio.us
- nexuist 7y ago
  Your demo page throws a security error on Firefox FYI.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    It's fixed, thanks. The cert failed to automatically renew and expired at a very inconvenient time.
- sneak 7y ago
  Be advised: your username-based subdomain is not browsable in modern security-conscious browsers as your LE cert for the main domain is not a wildcard cert and isn't valid for the username.historio.us subdomains.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    It is a wildcard cert, it just expired because for some reason acme.sh stopped liking the CloudFlare API. I'm trying to fix it as we speak, but the rate-limiting isn't helping. EDIT: It's back up, now I have to figure out why acme can't automatically renew... Very odd.
    - sneak 7y ago
      Ahh, sorry for the erroneous report, then. TIL: MobileSafari's certificate display doesn't show the subject alternative names.
      - StavrosK 7y ago
        It's no problem, thanks!
euler_angles 7y ago
Using Google to go back to something is only viable if the site stays online and Google doesn't change their algorithm in a way that makes what I'm looking for more difficult to find. Time and experience have shown me that sites are ephemeral and Google is constantly changing things, so that's why I archive the things that I find most useful.
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  Bookmarks don't really solve the website/page is no longer on line problem. But they do solve the Google moved the cheese problem.
  - euler_angles 7y ago
    Right. Which is why I archive, not bookmark.
zorbash 7y ago
Surfing the web is a journey. In the same sense that we store our photos on the cloud and don't want to lose them because they remind us of experiences. The web is no different, we keep exploring and take some souvenirs along the way. Why does everything have to be useful and optimal always? I wouldn't want to rely on Google to keep some nice memories and recall stuff I found useful.
- recursivequine 7y ago
  beautifully put, my bookmarks tell a story
pjc50 7y ago
The compromise version of this: use Pinboard. Make liberal use of the "read later" function and close the tab. Never open the "read later" list on Pinboard. You've now dealt with your desire to save it for the future in the least inconvenient way. (Slightly more seriously, if you get Pinboard archiving you can actually search the saved text of the bookmarks)
PretzelFisch 7y ago
Or, a book mark means I have vetted this page and know it to be of good high quality content. So in this context a bookmark search would be a good feature. Better layout and categorization would help as well. The services that tried and failed to provide this just redid browser bookmarks and added social. I think they missed out on why people have 100 tabs open.
- HelloNurse 7y ago
  For example, my ordinary PDF document creation needs are covered by trivially exporting them from LibreOffice. Should I need actual PDF editing, I'd open all of the bookmarks I filed under "utilities/PDF" over the years to find something useful: a lean compromise between proactively installing unneeded software and ignoring interesting things I stumble upon. I'd expect to do a web search for promising software that might have been moved since I bookmarked it, which would be obviously a smaller and easier task than a more open-ended search.
  - PretzelFisch 7y ago
    What I would find better as well is if a websearch could use this bookmarking as an additional flag to rank search results in a personal/social context. I imagine this was an ideal behind google+ plus marker thing.
JohnFen 7y ago
> Use Google when you want to go back to something. Yeah, good luck with that. Most of the things I bookmark are things that were really hard to find in the first place. Google isn't much help with stuff like that.
farisjarrah 7y ago
I feel like you might be missing out on the fact that people use bookmarks in different ways. I don't download most apps on my phone, so I use everything through firefox web browser on my android phone and I dont like having a million tabs open on my phone. So I use bookmarks to quickly get me to my bank or youtube or paypal, etc etc etc. Bookmarks arent just a tool for people to stash random things they'll never come back to. Sometimes people actually use bookmarks regularly for just day to day browsing.
bhl 7y ago
The type of serendipity you get from Google versus Bookmarks is not the same. Do you really want a singular company and search engine to determine how you surf the web? That was partially facetious but I do think bookmarking and googling are two different types of search.
xtiansimon 7y ago
> “I guess you need to create a search engine...” For years [1] I’ve been looking for a browser extension that will let me flip a switch and search only within the sites in my history and/or bookmarks. You know you’ve visited some sites with the answer you want, but have to try to recreate the divine moment in google. [1]: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solution-to-search-browser-url-history-first-before-the-rest-of-the-www/51691#51691 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solut...
silicon2401 7y ago
Your argument seems to be "I don't find something useful, so nobody else should use it" The whole point of bookmarks for me is to offload brain load. Rather than memorize little facts that are 99% useless, I can use an insignificant amount of storage to save a massive amount of information in case I ever need it. It's nice you don't have a need for them, but for those of us who do, "let go if it all" isn't helpful
forgotmypw 7y ago
If I bookmark and keyword it the first time I spend 15 minutes searching for it, I can save 15 minutes next time I need it.

munmaek 7y ago

Except with google it’s becoming impossible to find links from several years ago. Unless I remember exactly the right keywords and maybe the website name... How is this FOMO? The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this”. Bookmarks let you save content that you come across that may not be relevant at this time, but could be useful later. There is no penalty for saving pages because space is virtually unlimited, and we can only collect so many bookmarks anyway. Searching through bookmarks isn’t a difficult task, and it’s way better than relying on google.

nounaut 7y ago
Google (and related services, such as youtube) allows you to use before:YYYY-MM-DD and after:YYYY-MM-DD to only show results that were created before or after a certain date.
- monadgonad 7y ago
  I think you're missing the wood for the trees a bit there. The point is that there's so much on Google now - and a lot of it is effectively just crap data like pinterest posts - that it becomes increasingly impossible to find specific needles in that haystack. If I know at some point in the last 10 years I've read an article online that could have been written any point in the last 30 years, before and after dates don't really help.
  - beenBoutIT 7y ago
    Pintrest seems to inappropriately float to the top of way to many searches.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  You're suggesting spending a lot of time and hassle trying to wrestle with search engines instead of just keeping a bookmark that can be found and accessed very quickly?
dempedempe 7y ago
2600 has an essay, "The Mysteries of the Hidden Internet", on this phenomenon in their autumn 2019 quarterly. It was quite a fun read! Check it out at Barnes and Noble. Or buy a copy (https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019 https://store.2600.com/products/autumn-2019).
monkeynotes 7y ago
> The entire point of bookmarks is “maybe I’ll come back later to this” I think for me there is so much information coming at me every day, that I rarely have time to go back to something later. I bookmark a select number of sites for projects/interests I am working on but I couldn't deal with having ~5k worth of bookmarks in my backlog. I just don't have time for managing/triaging/reviewing that. My comment about FOMO addresses the fear of 'what if I can't find this stuff again'. It's more akin to a hoarding mentality, I suppose. How many people's garages are full of junk they 'think they might come back to later'. It's something I actively eschew because if I allow that thought process to enter into my life I'll be hindered by the activity, and the ability to let go is important to my happiness and wellbeing. I literally can't sleep at night if I think that I might missed out on archiving something I might need. I find it enlightening to treat the world as ephemeral. I freely admit different people work/think/live in different ways and perhaps my original comment was a little flippant.

StavrosK 7y ago

> I guess you need to create a search engine so you can search your bookmark collection I did: https://historio.us https://historio.us

nexuist 7y ago
Your demo page throws a security error on Firefox FYI.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  It's fixed, thanks. The cert failed to automatically renew and expired at a very inconvenient time.
sneak 7y ago
Be advised: your username-based subdomain is not browsable in modern security-conscious browsers as your LE cert for the main domain is not a wildcard cert and isn't valid for the username.historio.us subdomains.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  It is a wildcard cert, it just expired because for some reason acme.sh stopped liking the CloudFlare API. I'm trying to fix it as we speak, but the rate-limiting isn't helping. EDIT: It's back up, now I have to figure out why acme can't automatically renew... Very odd.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Ahh, sorry for the erroneous report, then. TIL: MobileSafari's certificate display doesn't show the subject alternative names.
    - StavrosK 7y ago
      It's no problem, thanks!

euler_angles 7y ago

Using Google to go back to something is only viable if the site stays online and Google doesn't change their algorithm in a way that makes what I'm looking for more difficult to find. Time and experience have shown me that sites are ephemeral and Google is constantly changing things, so that's why I archive the things that I find most useful.

PretzelFisch 7y ago
Bookmarks don't really solve the website/page is no longer on line problem. But they do solve the Google moved the cheese problem.
- euler_angles 7y ago
  Right. Which is why I archive, not bookmark.

zorbash 7y ago

Surfing the web is a journey. In the same sense that we store our photos on the cloud and don't want to lose them because they remind us of experiences. The web is no different, we keep exploring and take some souvenirs along the way. Why does everything have to be useful and optimal always? I wouldn't want to rely on Google to keep some nice memories and recall stuff I found useful.

recursivequine 7y ago
beautifully put, my bookmarks tell a story

pjc50 7y ago

The compromise version of this: use Pinboard. Make liberal use of the "read later" function and close the tab. Never open the "read later" list on Pinboard. You've now dealt with your desire to save it for the future in the least inconvenient way. (Slightly more seriously, if you get Pinboard archiving you can actually search the saved text of the bookmarks)

PretzelFisch 7y ago

Or, a book mark means I have vetted this page and know it to be of good high quality content. So in this context a bookmark search would be a good feature. Better layout and categorization would help as well. The services that tried and failed to provide this just redid browser bookmarks and added social. I think they missed out on why people have 100 tabs open.

HelloNurse 7y ago
For example, my ordinary PDF document creation needs are covered by trivially exporting them from LibreOffice. Should I need actual PDF editing, I'd open all of the bookmarks I filed under "utilities/PDF" over the years to find something useful: a lean compromise between proactively installing unneeded software and ignoring interesting things I stumble upon. I'd expect to do a web search for promising software that might have been moved since I bookmarked it, which would be obviously a smaller and easier task than a more open-ended search.
- PretzelFisch 7y ago
  What I would find better as well is if a websearch could use this bookmarking as an additional flag to rank search results in a personal/social context. I imagine this was an ideal behind google+ plus marker thing.

JohnFen 7y ago

> Use Google when you want to go back to something. Yeah, good luck with that. Most of the things I bookmark are things that were really hard to find in the first place. Google isn't much help with stuff like that.

farisjarrah 7y ago

I feel like you might be missing out on the fact that people use bookmarks in different ways. I don't download most apps on my phone, so I use everything through firefox web browser on my android phone and I dont like having a million tabs open on my phone. So I use bookmarks to quickly get me to my bank or youtube or paypal, etc etc etc. Bookmarks arent just a tool for people to stash random things they'll never come back to. Sometimes people actually use bookmarks regularly for just day to day browsing.

bhl 7y ago

The type of serendipity you get from Google versus Bookmarks is not the same. Do you really want a singular company and search engine to determine how you surf the web? That was partially facetious but I do think bookmarking and googling are two different types of search.

xtiansimon 7y ago

> “I guess you need to create a search engine...” For years [1] I’ve been looking for a browser extension that will let me flip a switch and search only within the sites in my history and/or bookmarks. You know you’ve visited some sites with the answer you want, but have to try to recreate the divine moment in google. [1]: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solution-to-search-browser-url-history-first-before-the-rest-of-the-www/51691#51691 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/46270/solut...

silicon2401 7y ago

Your argument seems to be "I don't find something useful, so nobody else should use it" The whole point of bookmarks for me is to offload brain load. Rather than memorize little facts that are 99% useless, I can use an insignificant amount of storage to save a massive amount of information in case I ever need it. It's nice you don't have a need for them, but for those of us who do, "let go if it all" isn't helpful

forgotmypw 7y ago

If I bookmark and keyword it the first time I spend 15 minutes searching for it, I can save 15 minutes next time I need it.